If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

by Lucy Worsley

My conclusion is that we have some distance yet to travel on this journey towards the good life, but that history can help to show us the way.

Because the room in which you slept was so much more than just a place of rest, the history of the bedroom is a vital strand in the history of society itself.

childbirth was the one part of household life over which men had no control.

‘Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,’ said the suffragette Susan B. Anthony

The closet was used for solitary activities – for praying, reading, meditating – or for storing precious art, musical instruments and books.

Great Stink of July 1858.

An advertisement for Thomas Crapper’s products … but, contrary to popular opinion, he did not invent the flushing toilet

The literary giant William Faulkner, jealous of the enormous commercial success of Margaret Mitchell’s ultra-romantic Gone with the Wind (1936), peevishly dismissed it as a trivial product of an over-feminised ‘Kotex Age’.

Edith Wharton, the American novelist, decoded the language of the nineteenth-century drawing room in a scene set in Victorian Mayfair.